The Victorian Supernatural (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Victorian Supernatural James Finley (bio) Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. xv+ 305, $65.00 cloth. The various ways "Victorians were haunted by the supernatural" (1) is the subject of this fine collection of interdisciplinary essays, part of the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series. The topics range across a spectrum that includes Spiritualism, science, dreams, ghost stories, religious mysticism, and reincarnation, but the broader theme of how Victorian literature and art (both "high" and "popular") reflected cultural understandings of the supernatural is kept consistently in sight. Editors Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (contributors all) have organized the volume into six thematic sections which, in the most general terms only, link the essays. The topics covered, as suggested above, run a broad gamut; fresh approaches and an abundance of unique insights make each essay an engaging read. Part I, "Supernatural Science," contains essays by Richard Noakes and Louise Henson on the broad fascination with and controversies over the supernatural in early to mid-Victorian Britain. Noakes argues that the simplistic dichotomies often used to describe debates over supernatural phenomena (i.e., "science versus Spiritualism" or "natural versus supernatural" [39]) are inadequate for rendering the complexity of the controversies. [End Page 108] Complementing this perspective, Henson treats the journalism and fiction of Charles Dickens as a cipher for "how broadly the subject of ghosts was defined in the early Victorian period" (61). In Part II, "Invisible Women," Eve M. Lynch, through a reading of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's ghost stories of the 1860s and 70s, discovers parallels between the two spectral presences of the Victorian home, servants and spirits. Pamela Thurschwell, in a reading of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), asserts the depiction of male and female characters' psychic abilities in that novel splits the narrative along patriarchal and feminine lines. Both essays emphasize the "invisibility" of marginalized females in Victorian society. With "Raising the Dead," Part III, Christian themes are explored by both Adam Roberts and Colin Cruise, writing on Robert Browning and Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), respectively. Roberts posits that Browning's dramatic monologues, which give voice to the dead, constitute "an aesthetics of resuscitation" (15), while Cruise, in his readings of Rolfe's "Toto" stories, claims that Rolfe's conversion to Catholicism kindled in him a fascination for magic that he could weave into these stories of a boy medium who gives voice to the dead. In Part IV, "Envisioning the Unseen," the focus is on imaging the supernatural, and Nicola Bown uses John Anster Fitzgerald's 1858 painting The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of as a springboard for inquiring into the Victorians' apparent lack of pictorial images of dreaming, and for examining, generally, Victorians' uncertain attitude toward the nature of dreams. Likewise, Michaela Giebelhausen considers Victorian artists Holman Hunt's and William Dyce's representation of the supernatural (or lack thereof) in their respective renderings of Christ. Part V, "Imperial Occult," features essays by Roger Luckhurst and Carolyn Burdett that deal with the relationship between British imperialism and the understanding of occult phenomena. Luckhurst focuses, in part, on the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, which collected accounts of paranormal experiences from all over the empire; he argues that "At the edges of Western rule, the supernatural clearly did function as a useful currency to articulate encounters" (212) and locates cases where "colonial contexts inform the categories of psychical research" (16). Turning toward popular literature, Burdett argues that the novels of H. Rider Haggard (particularly the four revolving around the character Ayesha, "She") reveal how the "supernatural played its part in the political culture of the period," and how, in the case of Haggard particularly, the adventure writer could use his "popular romances to consolidate an image of the modern future based on the values of Toryism and Anglicanism" (218). Finally, in Part VI, the one essay by Geoffrey Gilbert points beyond [End Page 109] the Victorian supernatural toward a "Haunted Modernism" (the section's heading) with a complex argument that delineates, via readings of Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" and references to Virginia Woolf's "Mr...